Neoliberal austerity is at once a form of Sadism – in the technical, psychoanalytic sense, rather than the everyday, moralising sense – and corporate anorexia. What Sadism and anorexia have in common is the belief in the indestructibility of the fantasmatic body: no matter how much I cut, how much I punish, the body will survive … In the Sadist’s case, the fantasmatic body is the body of the endlessly humiliated Other; in the anorexic’s case, the fantasmatic body is, in a sense, their ‘own’. Yet the infinite elasticity of the fantastic body eventually comes upon against the limits of the physical body. (Anorexia is the only mental illness that can directly kill you, but anorexics don’t want to die – they are engaged in an indefinite process of becoming-thinner which death actually interrupts.) It’s important to see how the capitalist fantasy necessarily oscillates between a punishing-without-end of an abjected fantasmatic body – where workers can be endlessly punished (restructured) and-or eliminated (cut) – and a belated recognition that the fantasmatic body depends on an actual, physically precarious body , with vulnerabilities and real limits. You could say that Capital as such cannot recognise the collective worker-body as belonging to it; only communism can perform this integration.

The ultimate fantasy here – the ultimate fantasy of Capital ‘itself’ – is of cutting workers away altogether. Capital’s libidinal metaphysics is a kind of cosmic libertarianism: Capital identifies itself as a force of unbounded energy, whose capacity for infinite accumulation is obstructed only by political contingencies. Soon, always soon, Capital dreams, I will be free of the need for politics … and free of the need for humans too … (“… liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… “) Capital’s realised utopia would be a burned-out planet full of fully-automated factories turning out shit that no-one wants to buy, with no-one left to buy it any way, because the conditions for the continued existence of these factories is the destruction of an environment humans can live in.

maybe getting eatenalive is a very pleasurable experience but anybody who survives hads their memories rewritten to make it painful but actually the immediate process is awesome